Hunza valley: The real Shangri-la

[Kapa]

The Sunday Times May 14, 2006

The hard way to heaven

If Rosie Thomas can get to Pakistan’s Hunza valley in one piece, there’ll be a spiritual reward, spectacular views and all the fruit she can eat

You need to keep your eye on the ball out there,” our travel agent called to say, just before we left home. Not the most reassuring parting shot, but then we were heading off in search of the Hunza valley.

Near the border between Pakistan and China, high up on the Pakistani side and hidden within the great bulwark of the Karakoram mountains, this fabled valley lies hidden from the world. I had once heard native Hunza mountain guides and porters talking about their home with fierce pride, and I had read that despite its altitude and isolation, the valley is an exquisite place of apricot groves and fertile fields, irrigated by ancient stone waterways that channel glacier melt down from the mountains. I also knew that it has a claim to be the real Shangri-la.

We planned to fly to the town of Gilgit, then take a Jeep up and into the mountains. At the domestic terminal of Islamabad airport at 5am, as the check-in for PIA’s Gilgit flight opened, the merest glimpse of the ball would have been welcome. Wherever it was — among the string-tied bundles carried by the men with the faces of Pathan warriors who were braced at the front of the queue, or perhaps hidden in the several suitcases belonging to the worryingly sweaty Pakistani businessman in a western suit — we had entirely lost sight of it.

Our local travel operator had insisted the night before that all flights to Gilgit were cancelled for the next two days due to bad weather, and strongly advised us to take a car and a driver, and make the two-day drive up the Karakoram Highway instead.

This would have been acceptable advice, but for the KKH’s well-earned reputation as one of the toughest drives on earth — a bone-jarring ride of hairpin bends, precipitous drops to torrential rivers, roads blocked by rockfall and mudslide, trucks decked out like runaway fairground rides that hog the crown of the road and swirl by with a margin of an inch and a blast on the horn. I wasn’t keen.

Besides, PIA told us the flight might go, inshallah. Or it might not. Worth a try, we reckoned.

The agent had sent over our prepaid tickets late the previous night, when we insisted on flying. Once we’d elbowed up to the check-in desk, however, they turned out to be only standby, and the flight was declared to be absolutely full. In any case, it wasn’t going because of the weather. An hour later, it turned out that it was going, only we still weren’t on it.

A scrum ensued as we grimly tussled for the ball. No fabulous mountain hideaway for us, or not today, at any rate.

In the final minute before the flight closed, boarding cards were resignedly slapped into our hands and we were hustled into the last seats on the tiny plane. A mere hour of sweating on the tarmac followed, as poor weather reports came in from Gilgit, then suddenly the propellers started turning and we were off.

It soon became clear why the weather was such a big deal. We flew across the front of Nanga Parbat (8,125 metres) and circled as the pilot tried to get a view through the shifting towers of cloud that kept obscuring the narrow entrance to the dogleg Gilgit valley. When the plane finally dipped and darted forwards, the wingtips seemed almost to scrape the rock walls on either side, and below us nothing was visible except the churning, cement-coloured river water. When the wheels finally touched the miniature runway, the passengers’ collective gasp of relief rocked the plane.

A Jeep and driver were waiting for us. We learnt that there had been a local outbreak of sectarian conflict and some shootings; the forbidding streets of Gilgit seemed full of police and military. We were hustled out of town rather rapidly and onto the KKH, to follow the river through a cleft between white mountains so high that we had to crane our necks under the Jeep’s canopy to glimpse the summits.

By now, the prospect of seeing Hunza was beginning to shimmer with all the allure of the unattainable. But only three hours later, we actually reached Karimabad, the region’s sunny capital, and the world suddenly turned all the shades of gold and umber. Every doorstep and flat roof and spare foot of ground was covered with shallow woven baskets filled with apricots drying in the sun.

If Pakistan were visited by flocks of tourists, they would be drawn here by the busload, instead of in intrepid twos and threes. Enclosed by seven 7,000-metre peaks and their glaciers, Karimabad lies beneath Ultar mountain and faces the huge snow ridges of Mount Rakaposhi, yet it is a sweet and fertile place, divided by low dry-stone walls into fruit orchards and fields of maize, rippling with poplars and willows. The bazaar is a single line of shops and simple hotels lining the steep cobbled street that winds up to the Baltit fort, a huge palace-fortress of stone with timber roofs and galleries in a distinctly Tibetan style.

Set between the carpet-weaving workshops and the pashmina stalls and craft galleries is the snug Café de Hunza. It had a real espresso machine on the counter, and wedges of carrot cake, just like in Totnes or Ambleside. This National Trusty familiarity closed around us like a homely Shangri-la.

We lingered with our cappuccinos and admired the astounding view, agreeing that the pleasure of being at last in Karimabad was directly related to the difficulty of reaching it.

(A stiff drink might have hit the celebratory spot even more precisely. But this was Pakistan and the duty-free had run out long ago.) After a tour of the fort and tea in the home of our new local driver, it was time to fold ourselves stiffly into the Jeep for the final leg of our journey: up the potholed mountainside track to the Eagle’s Nest hotel, in the hamlet of Duikar.

By the last light of the sun, as the shadows of Rakaposhi, the black spire of Lady Finger and the other high peaks extinguished the gleaming curves of the river far below, we reached a long, low stone building on a sheltered plateau. Shangri-la? I’m not sure.

The hotel itself is not the material of legends, but it is a clean, welcoming place and every room faces the peaks and glaciers. With that view, any interior decor could only look tawdry.

FOR THOSE more actively inclined, there are classic day treks to be had on the Ultar glacier and further afield, as well as plenty of longer options, but we were in need of rest and recuperation. We spent the days reading, sunbathing on our balcony, lounging in the shade under a 900-year-old walnut tree, watching the light on the snowy peaks or chatting to the hotel’s owner Ali Madat, or one of his five brothers, all of whom are involved in the family business.

We pottered up and down the dirt lanes of Duikar and were warmly greeted everywhere. Ismailism is a liberal doctrine, under which girls are educated as equals with boys and women do not have to cover their faces. After other areas of Pakistan where women are never glimpsed in public, egalitarian Hunza, with its trickling streams and trees dripping with golden apricots, seemed a tranquil and benign enclave.

One morning, we got up before dawn to watch the sunrise gilding the tip of Rakaposhi, then exploding on the lower slopes in a flush of reckless rose-pink and bright orange. Another day, we wandered through the meadows and up the hillside to inspect the system of ancient stone-built watercourses that collect glacier melt and channel it in stone rills down to the patchwork fields and crops below, the secret of the valley’s abundant fertility.

Otherwise, we rested and just looked at the mountains. And by the time the day came to leave, the Hunza valley had fully restored the energies we had expended searching for its rare gifts.

Iris & Ruby by Rosie Thomas (HarperCollins £12.99) is out now in hardback

Travel brief: Wild Frontiers (020 7736 3968, http://www.wildfrontiers.co.uk) has a 17-day trip visiting Peshawar, the Khyber Pass, Chitral and the Hunza valley; from £1,995pp, full-board, including British Airways flights from Heathrow to Islamabad, internal transport and sightseeing. Or try Himalayan Kingdoms (01453 844400, http://www.himalayankingdoms.com).

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